How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing

Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by chrismiller on Saturday October 02, 2010 @10:25PM (#1751910)

This might be slightly off topic but if you don't mind could you share the specs of your Varnish server? Everything I have read about Varnish says that it will run extremely well on pretty much any decent hardware. But I am still unsure how much power I should be providing it.

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by jacquesm on Saturday October 02, 2010 @11:00PM (#1751966)

How many hits per day are you expecting?

We serve up about 2000 requests per instance per second, 8 instances on an 8 core machine with 32 G of RAM.

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by pvg on Sunday October 03, 2010 @12:52AM (#1752108)

Why run separate instances on the same box?

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by jacquesm on Sunday October 03, 2010 @04:24AM (#1752373)

To get over a bunch of limits.

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by moe on Sunday October 03, 2010 @01:20PM (#1753098)

What limits?

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by jacquesm on Sunday October 03, 2010 @01:31PM (#1753123)

Specifically 65K file descriptors, I can't seem to get around that one in spite of all the limits having been raised appropriately.

So I ended up running multiple instances. I've discussed this with a few other HN'ers and we agree that it shouldn't be necessary but to date I have no solution for this.

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by chrismiller on Saturday October 02, 2010 @11:09PM (#1751979)

Thanks for the numbers they are very helpful.

Probably <500 cache hits per second (a large portion of the content isn't cacheable).

So I should be able to serve that from a fairly low spec machine.

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by jacquesm on Saturday October 02, 2010 @11:12PM (#1751984)

I should probably add that those boxes have an improbably low load. 500 hits / second out of varnish ? Do you have a spare laptop lying around, could be an old one? ;)

One good way to test is to replay a days worth of log files.

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by chopsueyar on Sunday October 03, 2010 @11:55AM (#1752909)

This for ww?

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by jacquesm on Sunday October 03, 2010 @12:10PM (#1752939)

I wish :)

No, it's actually for a competitor, I helped put their CDN together.

WW is only about 100K uniques per day, that site is pushing very close to 2 million now.

For ww.com I still use a very old chunk of software called 'yawwws', it takes care of the stills in the index and the index pages themselves. Hopefully we'll be able to phase it out soon for a Yii/memcached/varnish driven combo.

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Re:How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing by StavrosK on Sunday October 03, 2010 @03:12AM (#1752294)

As jaquesm said, with your expected visits, you will probably see no load at all, so don't worry about it. You definitely don't need to give it more power, unless you're running it on a cellphone...

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